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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Batman: No Man's Land

by Greg Rucka

(New York: Pocket Books, 2000)

Hardcover, 430 Pages, Fiction

“All
Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here. GOTHAM CITY: a dark, twisted reflection of
urban America. Overcrowded, overbuilt, and overshadowed by a continuous air of
menace, this gothic nightmare is a breeding ground for the depraved, the
indifferent, and the criminally insane. It’s also the object of one man’s
obsession. Forever scarred as a child from witnessing the brutal murder of his
parents, Bruce Wayne has dedicated his life to protecting this city from its
many predators, taking a form to inspire hope in the innocent … and fear in the
guilty. He is the masked vigilante knows as the Batman. With Police
Commissioner James Gordon, these two men have always fought to preserve law and
order, side-by-side, struggling against a pervasive and relentless criminal
element, working together to hold the line. Until now. Leveled by a massive earthquake that has left thousands dead and
millions more wounded, Gotham City has been completely cut off from outside
aid, transformed into a lawless battleground—a No Man’s Land—where the
survivors are turning against one another, and where the city’s protectors are
torn by a crisis that may consume them all.
Gotham now teeters at the edge of the abyss … and Batman is missing.”

So, after returning to
school in 2005, spending four years getting my bachelor’s degree in literary
studies, and then two very intense years getting my master’s in the same field
… it has been a long time since I was able to read a book
solely for the pleasure of it. Books have been read to be analyzed and written
about, and I’ve made a pretty good “living” during my academic years doing
this, and hope to parlay all of this into a PhD and eventually a career
teaching English at a college or university somewhere. However, for the time
being, I am between gigs (so to speak) and since I am unemployed, I have quite
a bit of time on my hands. This is why I decided that it was time to
retire Bryan’s Book Blog and start Reading Past My
Bedtime, so that I could gain some perspective on reading and learn how to
read and write about books in a non-academic way once again. There was a false
start, but after some time (and a rebalancing of my medication and shedding
some emotional baggage) I’ve decided to try it all again.

With books, though, it’s
been harder to turn that off. I was originally intending to make the re-inaugural
review of Stephen King’s most recent book 11/22/63. However, every
time I started the book I only got a handful of pages into it, before I stalled
and had to put it down. (I think I’ve been too traumatized and disappointed by
King in the last decade (Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Just
After Sunset, Full Dark, No Stars, Under the Dome, Mile
81) that I was extremely reluctant to dive back into a Stephen King story.
It was as if I had a mental block of some kind. So I tried to move on to a book
I knew I liked, The Shining, but after doing so much academic work (and basing a
number of papers, including a stalled thesis) on this story, I simply couldn’t turn off my analytical brain.
So, I decided to pluck a book off of the library shelf that I wanted to read
for a very very long time … well, at
least for the past eight or ten years or so: Batman: No Man’s Land.

Beside trying to use this
to jump-start relearning how to read for pleasure, my six-year-old son and
four-year-old daughter are really in
to Batman and so it felt like a good thing to read (if only to backfill my
spotty knowledge of the BatMythos). So, imagine my surprise when what I found
was a great book. I guess I expected to read a half-assed adaptation of the
comic book run of the No Man’s Land storyline that was really lacking because
it was missing the visual element of the comic books. However, as I said, this
was not the case, in fact No Man’s Land
is a great story and Rucka really sells it, though considering he was one of the writers on the No Man’s
Land arc in the Batman comics, it comes as no surprise.

What I loved most about
this book and in particular the story as it fits into the overall BatMythos is
the way in which the characters of both James Gordon and Barbara Gordon (here
in her Oracle guise) are extremely well rounded and very much humanized. As two of the characters in the comics who
are very much vested in Batman, his disappearance from at least the first third
to half of the story pushes these two characters well beyond their comfort
zone. Commissioner Gordon must begin to take back his city on his own, without
the help of the Bat, based on his own not inconsiderable intelligence and
ability as a police officer. That he fails at times and that Rucka allows him
to be angry with himself and others and even lash out at times helps the Reader
to see further into Gordon’s mind and his personality. It turns Gordon into the
main protagonist, whereas it would otherwise be Batman. As for Barbara Gordon,
her role as Oracle (a kind of Batgirl-cum-Big
Brother (Sister?) after being paralyzed by the Joker) allows Rucka to tell
stories that one might otherwise miss in the chaos and aftermath of the
earthquake. As with her father, the disappearance of Batman allows Barbara
Gordon to vent her own anger and frustration and her own humanity, especially
since she is trapped in her apartment (given that she is confined to a
wheelchair and the power is out in her building, so no elevator). In this way,
Barbara Gordon becomes our all-seeing Narrator, standing in for yet another
role that would normally be filled by Batman.

Even when Batman finally
does reemerge and begins to take back Gotham City, this does not push the
Gordons to the second tier. James Gordon still stays the chief protagonist
(after all it is his city that he is fighting for, and he has the biggest stake
in it) and Barbara Gordon fully takes up the role of Oracle once more and it is
her knowledge that continues to drive the action, and once the whole Bat Family
is reunited with Tim Drake/Robin and Dick Grayson/Nightwing returning, and
Cassandra Cain taking up the mantle of Batgirl and even Huntress being brought
into the fold, the action really does drive to a rather climactic and sobering
conclusion. Add to the mix some of the best villains in Batman’s Rogue Gallery,
including Two-Face, The Penguin, assassin David Cain, Bane, and the Joker and
Harley Quinn (who was brought into the DC comics canon from the Batman animated
cartoon in this story arc) as well as Superman heavies Lex Luthor and Mercy
Graves (who also made the jump from the animated Superman cartoon to the DC
comic book canon in this story arc) and it really makes for one hell of a
story. My favorite scenes … the ones where Batman menaces Lex Luthor; absolute
gold!

All of this aside, if I did
have one complaint about the book it is actually two things. First and
foremost, while the story as a whole works, and while the various points of the
plot are all necessary given that the story arc in the comics ran across nine
months in nearly 100 issues spanning sixteen different titles … a 430 page
novel doesn’t really cover it all, and a lot of it—especially in the
middle—feels rushed (I’m looking at you Bane and David Cain plot points). In
the end, though, Rucka does make up for it by finishing with one of the most
intense and emotional climaxes I have ever read (though I think it hit me
especially hard being a husband and a father). My one other “complaint” is that
No Man’s Land is not a good gateway
story into the Batman Universe. Not that it is meant to be or even should be,
but as one of the only novel adaptations of the Batman comic books, it stands
as an entryway whether or not it wants to be, but if these are the only real
faults that I can find in this book, then it’s got a lot more going for it than
it has against it.